Review: Someone Else's Life by Katie Dale

Title: Someone Else's Life
Author: Katie Dale
Publication date: February 14th 2012
Publisher: Delacorte Books For Young Readers
Age group: Young Adult
Genre: Realistic Fiction
Cover rating: 3/5
Content rating: 4/5
Buy: Amazon

Description:

When seventeen-year-old Rosie’s mother, Trudie, dies from Huntington’s Disease, her pain is intensified by the knowledge that she has a fifty-per-cent chance of inheriting the crippling disease herself. Only when she tells her mum’s best friend, ‘Aunt Sarah’ that she is going to test for the disease does Sarah, a midwife, reveal that Trudie was not her biological mother after all... Devastated, Rosie decides to trace her real mother, hitching along on her ex-boyfriend’s GAP year to follow her to Los Angeles. 

But all does not go to plan, and as Rosie discovers yet more of her family's deeply-buried secrets and lies, she is left with an agonising decision of her own - one which will be the most heart-breaking and far-reaching of all...

My thoughts:
Wow, Someone Else's Life completely blew me away. It was so good! The premise is really excellent- and sad! Rosie's mum has died from a disease called Huntington's. I'll be honest and say I knew nothing about Huntington's before I read this book. I'm sure I've heard the name before but I didn't know what it really was what it did to people and their families. This book was incredibly informative about the disorder and I definitely feel like I learned something from reading it. Besides losing her mum, Rosie is also dealing with the terrifying 50/50 chance of having inherited Huntington's herself.

As you can imagine, Rosie world is pretty crazy. But it doesn't stop there. At the beginning of this novel, she finds out that she does not, in fact, have Huntington's. Not because of luck- but because her mother was not actually her mother. Rosie was switched with another baby at birth. She is of course in shock and determined to find out the truth about her past. In the midst of her grief, she throws herself head first in to this task.

Rosie's journey is a scary one. She goes off with her ex-boyfriend Andy to the US because that's where her birth mother is. I was completely captivated by this story and gripped the whole way through! The writing is excellent and nice to read. There are a lot of twists thrown into this book. Some of them were predictable but some of them took me completely by surprise. I never knew what was going to happen next and was really worried for all the characters. Every step of the way, Rosie's situation becomes more complicated and I couldn't wait to see how it was going to end up.

My only problem with this book is its length. It's almost 500 pages and while this would be fine if the book warranted it, I really don't think it did. The two POVs probably made this book much longer than it really needed to be. Other than that though, Someone Else's Life is a beautiful and educational story about family, loss and ethics. I would certainly recommend it!